The group meeting was short today, mostly because everyone is still in proposal crunch-time mode—that means working hard writing proposals to get funding new, exciting SETI projects in the next year. Check this space for updates as to what new stuff will be going on in the upcoming year.

In server news: mork had a hardware crash yesterday. We recovered it, and then the database crashed, which rarely happens. Sadly this means there is a possibility it could be corrupt. In this case, we’re going to make Jocelyn the master server for the time being (though it’s not that great). This means that the project could slow down a little bit until we have the new machine put into place. That brings us the topic of our new machines, which hopefully we will get soon.

As you might have heard, we are making progress of developing a visual RFI (radio frequency interference, also known as junk) rejection system that allows users to look at plots and visibly reject RFI. Progress on the project is coming along— Matt got his version working so that the signals that we know RFI show up in a different color. Which raises the question: what colors should we use for the RFI?

Red and Green are not necessarily good choices as some of our users might be colorblind.
Another question this raises is due to the fact that a majority of the stuff we see is RFI. Do we want to send all of it (including massive amounts of RFI) out to the public, or eliminate some of the RFI first? There is a lot of development still left to be done on this project, but when it’s done, hopefully it will be a cool new way for SETI@Home users to interact and contribute to the science behind SETI@Home.

That’s all for this week, thanks for tuning in!